Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (6 page)

Cochrane said with benign cynicism:

"Jamison, you work by guessing where you can go. Jones works by guessing
where he is. But this is a public relations job. I don't know where we
are or where we can go, but I know where we want to take this thing."

Jones looked at him. Not hostilely, but with the detached interest of a
man accustomed to nearly exact science, when he watches somebody work in
one of the least precise of them all.

Holden said:

"You mean you've worked out some sort of production."

"No production," said Cochrane blandly. "It isn't necessary. A straight
public-relations set-up. We concoct a story and then let it leak out. We
make it so good that even the people who don't believe it can't help
spreading it." He nodded at Jamison. "Right now, Jamison, we want a
theory that the sending of radiation at twenty times the speed of light
means that there is a way to send matter faster than light—as soon as
we work it out. It means that the inertia-mass which increases with
speed—Einstein's stuff—is not a property of matter, but of space, just
as the air-resistance that increases when an airplane goes faster is a
property of air and not of the plane. Maybe we need to work out a theory
that all inertia is a property of space. We'll see if we need that. But
anyhow, just as a plane can go faster in thin air, so matter—any
matter—will move faster in this field as soon as we get the trick of
it. You see?"

Holden shook his head.

"What's that got in it to make Dabney famous?" he asked.

"Jamison will extrapolate from there," Cochrane assured him. "Go ahead,
Jamison. You're on."

Jamison said promptly, with the hypnotic smoothness of the practiced
professional:

"When this development has been completed, not only will messages be
sent at multiples of the speed of light, but matter! Ships! The barrier
to the high destiny of mankind; the limitation of our race to a single
planet of a minor sun—these handicaps crash and will shatter as the
great minds of humanity bend their efforts to make the Dabney
faster-than-light principle the operative principle of our ships. There
are thousands of millions of suns in our galaxy, and not less than one
in three has planets, and among these myriads of unknown worlds there
will be thousands with seas and land and clouds and continents, fit for
men to enter upon, there to rear their cities. There will be starships
roaming distant sun-clusters, and landing on planets in the Milky Way.
We ourselves will see freight-lines to Rigel and Arcturus, and journey
on passenger-liners singing through the void to Andromeda and Aldebaran!
Dabney has made the first breach in the barrier to the illimitable
greatness of humanity!"

Then he stopped and said professionally:

"I can polish that up a bit, of course. All right?"

"Fair," conceded Cochrane. He turned to Holden. "How about a
public-relations job on that order? Won't that sort of publicity meet
the requirements? Will your patient be satisfied with that grade of
appreciation?"

Holden drew a deep breath. He said unsteadily:

"As a neurotic personality, he won't require that it be true. All he'll
want is the seeming. But—Jed, could it be really true? Could it?"

Cochrane laughed unpleasantly. He did not admire himself. His laughter
showed it.

"What do you want?" he demanded. "You got me a job I didn't want. You
shoved it down my throat! Now there's the way to get it done! What more
can you ask?"

Holden winced. Then he said heavily:

"I'd like for it to be true."

Jones moved suddenly. He said in an oddly surprised voice:

"D'you know, it can be! I didn't realize! It can be true! I can make a
ship go faster than light!"

Cochrane said with exquisite irony:

"Thanks, but we don't need it. We aren't getting paid for that! All we
need is a modicum of appreciation for a neurotic son-in-law of a partner
of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe! A public-relations job is all
that's required. You give West the theory, and Jamison will do the
prophecy, and Bell will write it out."

Jones said calmly:

"I will like hell! Look! I discovered this faster-than-light field in
the first place! I sold it to Dabney because he wanted to be famous! I
got my pay and he can keep it! But if he can't understand it himself,
even to lecture about it ... Do you think I'm going to throw in some
extra stuff I noticed, that I can fit into that theory but nobody else
can—Do you think I'm going to give him starships as a bonus?"

Holden said, nodding, with his lips twisted:

"I should have figured that! He bought his great discovery from you, eh?
And that's what he gets frustrated about!"

Cochrane snapped:

"I thought you psychiatrists knew the facts of life, Bill! Dabney's not
unusual in my business! He's almost a typical sponsor!"

"When you ask me to throw away starships," said Jones coldly, "for a
publicity feature, I don't play. I won't take the credit for the field
away from Dabney. I sold him that with my eyes open. But starships are
more important than a fool's hankering to be famous! He'd never try it!
He'd be afraid it wouldn't work! I don't play!"

Holden said stridently:

"I don't give a damn about any deal you made with Dabney! But if you can
get us to the stars—all us humans who need it—you've got to!"

Jones said, again calmly:

"I'm willing. Make me an offer—not cash, but a chance to do something
real—not just a trick for a neurotic's ego!"

Cochrane grinned at him very peculiarly.

"I like your approach. You've got illusions. They're nice things to
have. I wouldn't mind having some myself. Bill," he said to Dr. William
Holden, "how much nerve has Dabney?"

"Speaking unprofessionally," said Holden, "he's a worm with wants. He
hasn't anything but cravings. Why?"

Cochrane grinned again, his head cocked on one side.

"He wouldn't take part in an enterprise to reach the stars, would he?"
When Holden shook his head, Cochrane said zestfully, "I'd guess that the
peak of his ambition would be to have the credit for it if it worked,
but he wouldn't risk being associated with it until it had worked!
Right?"

"Right," said Holden. "I said he was a worm. What're you driving at?"

"I'm outlining what you're twisting my arm to make me do," said
Cochrane, "in case you haven't noticed. Bill, if Jones can really make
a ship go faster than light—"

"I can," repeated Jones. "I simply didn't think of the thing in
connection with travel. I only thought of it for signalling."

"Then," said Cochrane, "I'm literally forced, for Dabney's sake, to do
something that he'd scream shrilly at if he heard about it. We're going
to have a party, Bill! A party after your and my and Jones' hearts!"

"What do you mean?" demanded Holden.

"We make a production after all," said Cochrane, grinning. "We are going
to take Dabney's discovery—the one he bought publicity rights to—very
seriously indeed. I'm going to get him acclaim. First we break a story
of what Dabney's field means for the future of mankind—and then we
prove it! We take a journey to the stars! Want to make your reservations
now?"

"You mean," said West incredulously, "a genuine trip? Why?"

Cochrane snapped at him suddenly.

"Because I can't kid myself any more," he rasped. "I've found out how
little I count in the world and the estimation of Kursten, Kasten,
Hopkins and Fallowe! I've found out I'm only a little man when I thought
I was a big one, and I won't take it! Now I've got an excuse to try to
be a big man! That's reason enough, isn't it?"

Then he glared around the small laboratory under the dust-heap. He was
irritated because he did not feel splendid emotions after making a
resolution and a plan which ought to go down in history—if it worked.
He wasn't uplifted. He wasn't aware of any particular feeling of being
the instrument of destiny or anything else. He simply felt peevish and
annoyed and obstinate about trying the impossible trick.

It annoyed him additionally, perhaps, to see the expression of
starry-eyed admiration on Babs' face as she looked at him across the
untidy laboratory table, cluttered up with beer-cans.

It is a matter of record that the American continents were discovered
because ice-boxes were unknown in the fifteenth century. There being no
refrigeration, meat did not keep. But meat was not too easy to come by,
so it had to be eaten, even when it stank. Therefore it was a noble
enterprise, and to the glory of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, to
put up the financial backing for even a crackpot who might get spices
cheaper and thereby make the consumption of slightly spoiled meat less
unpleasant. Which was why Columbus got three ships and crews of
jailbirds for them from a government still busy trying to drive the
Moors out of the last corner of Spain.

This was a precedent for the matter on hand now. Cochrane happened to
know the details about Columbus because he'd checked over the research
when he did a show on the Dikkipatti Hour dealing with him. There were
more precedents. The elaborate bargain by which Columbus was to be made
hereditary High Admiral of the Western Oceans, with a bite of all
revenue obtained by the passage he was to discover—he had to hold out
for such terms to make the package he was selling look attractive.
Nobody buys anything that is underpriced too much. It looks phoney. So
Cochrane made his preliminaries rather more impressive than they need
have been from a strictly practical point of view, in order to make the
enterprise practical from a financial aspect.

There was another precedent he did not intend to follow. Columbus did
not know where he was going when he set sail, he did not know where he
was when he arrived at the end of his voyage, and he didn't know where
he'd been when he got back. Cochrane expected to improve on the
achievement of the earlier explorer's doings in these respects.

He commandeered the legal department of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins, and
Fallowe to set up the enterprise with strict legality and discretion.
There came into being a corporation called "Spaceways, Inc." which could
not possibly be considered phoney from any inspection of its charter.
Expert legal advice arranged that its actual stock-holders should appear
to be untraceable. Deft manipulation contrived that though its stock was
legally vested in Cochrane and Holden and Jones—Cochrane negligently
threw in Jones as a convenient name to use—and they were officially the
owners of nearly all the stock, nobody who checked up would believe they
were anything but dummies. Stockholdings in West's, and Jamison's and
Bell's names would look like smaller holdings held for other than the
main entrepreneurs. But these stock-holders were not only the legal
owners of record—they were the true owners. Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins
and Fallowe wanted no actual part of Spaceways. They considered the
enterprise merely a psychiatric treatment for a neurotic son-in-law.
Which, of course, it was. So Spaceways, Inc., quite honestly and validly
belonged to the people who would cure Dabney of his frustration—and
nobody at all believed that it would ever do anything else. Not anybody
but those six owners, anyhow. And as it turned out, not all of them.

The psychiatric treatment began with an innocent-seeming news-item from
Lunar City saying that Dabney, the so-and-so scientist, had consented to
act as consulting physicist to Spaceways, Inc., for the practical
application of his recent discovery of a way to send messages faster
than light.

This was news simply because it came from the moon. It got fairly wide
distribution, but no emphasis.

Then the publicity campaign broke. On orders from Cochrane, Jamison the
extrapolating genius got slightly plastered, in company with the two
news-association reporters in Lunar City. He confided that Spaceways,
Inc., had been organized and was backed to develop the Dabney
faster-than-light-signalling field into a faster-than-light-travel
field. The news men pumped him of all his extrapolations. Cynically,
they checked to see who might be preparing to unload stock. They found
no preparations for stock-sales. No registration of the company for
raising funds. It wasn't going to the public for money. It wasn't
selling anybody anything. Then Cochrane refused to see any reporters at
all, everybody connected with the enterprise shut up tighter than a
clam, and Jamison vanished into a hotel room where he was kept occupied
with beverages and food at Dabney's father-in-law's expense. None of
this was standard for a phoney promotion deal.

The news story exploded. Let loose on an overcrowded planet which had
lost all hope of relief after fifty years in which only the moon had
been colonized—and its colony had a population in the hundreds,
only—the idea of faster-than-light travel was the one impossible dream
that everybody wanted to believe in. The story spread in a manner that
could only be described as chain-reaction in character. And of course
Dabney—as the scientist responsible for the new hope—became known to
all peoples.

The experts of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe checked on the
publicity given to Dabney. Strict advertising agency accounting figured
that to date the cost-per-customer-mention of Dabney and his discovery
were the lowest in the history of advertising. Surveys disclosed that
within three Earth-days less than 3.5 of every hundred interviews
questioned were completely ignorant of Dabney and the prospect of travel
to the stars through his discovery. More people knew Dabney's name than
knew the name of the President of the United States!

That was only the beginning. The leading popular-science show jumped
eight points in audience-rating. It actually reached top-twenty rating
when it assigned a regular five-minute period to the Dabney Field and
its possibilities in human terms. On the sixth day after Jamison's
calculated indiscretion, the public consciousness was literally
saturated with the idea of faster-than-light transportation. Dabney was
mentioned in every interview of every stuffed shirt, he was referred
to on every comedy show (three separate jokes had been invented, which
were developed into one thousand eight hundred switcheroos, most
of them only imperceptibly different from the original trio) and
even Marilyn Winters—Little Aphrodite Herself—was demanding a
faster-than-light-travel sequence in her next television show.